Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (11 page)

“Brother, you had a close call,” the bartender confided. “That was Billy’s old man and his kid brother. I was afraid you were going to say
yella,
and they would have belted you.”

Looking back, I think the Conns were itching to have some innocent come along and charge their Billy with the most unforgivable adjective in the lexicon of pugilistica. They had a load of pent-up frustration to work off that night.

Remember, we are still at the weigh-in, waiting for the appearance of Marciano and Charles, or Patterson and Johansson. The fighters have finally arrived and are undressing. In the pre-TV days they would strip naked and take their turns on the commission scales, some studiously avoiding each other, some genuinely friendly, some employing do-it-yourself
psychology, subtly insulting or belittling the opponent, or training on him a smoldering evil eye. Now a big weigh-in is a dressier affair. The contestants affect trunks in deference to the battery of cameras and to the womenfolk who have begun to decorate these affairs. Marciano-Charles-Patterson-Johansson have finally entered the improvised ring and a hundred sweaty, quick-tempered photogs desperately jockey for position, amidst shouts, curses, and desperate pleas. It is something like a Rugby scrum with every player holding a Graflex in his hand. A little war goes on between the cameramen and the reporters who are being driven back from their vantage points near the ropes. Hangers-on invariably position themselves between the lenses and the fighters. The most unprintable oaths are called down upon them. The fighters bear it all with grim, put-upon stoicism. They assume a make-believe fighter’s stance, facing each other with bare hands, while all sorts of visiting firemen, politicians, commissioners, promoters, etc., horn into the act. At the Marciano-Charles weigh-in I noticed Joe Louis hanging back, somehow lost in the pushing crowd, the only man not trying to get into the picture, and the only man in the uncomfortably crowded room who had the right.

Watching the old poker-faced king watching his successors, I was reminded of another night at the Edison Hotel. This was a few years back when Ezzard Charles, who had won half-hearted title recognition with a lackluster win over Jersey Joe Walcott, consolidated his claim to the world’s championship by handing a blubbery, sadly overweight Joe Louis a painful licking. Charles hadn’t knocked the old Bomber out, because he wasn’t a take-’em-out puncher like Rocky, but giving away almost thirty-five pounds to our god of the thirties and forties, he had tormented and humiliated the old champion, who staggered and floundered gallantly on to the end of the fifteenth round.

Back at the Edison, Charles’s headquarters, his managers, Jake Mintz and Tom Tannas, were throwing a victory party. I
came in on a scene that might have been a George Bellows version of New Year’s Eve. Again it was strictly guys and dolls à la Pittsburgh, the home of Ez’s oddly contrasted managers. It was Free Loaders’ Night, with hangers-on, relatives, gamblers, happy hoods, and a smattering of sportsminded gentry pouring the free scotch and telling each other what a great fighter and prince among men was Ezzard Charles. “I always knew that Joe Louis was a bum,” quoth lionhearted and overjoyed Jake (“The Mouth”) Mintz. “I tell you, Ez is going to be one of the great heavyweight champions of all time.”

“Incidentally, where is Ez?” I asked Jake when I could insert a word or two.

“Upstairs, gowan up if ya wanna,” said the late Jake, a language-fracturer in a class with Joe Jacobs and Mushky Jackson.

Upstairs I found a tableau of the fight game. Ezzard, who had looked from ringside an easy winner, was stretched out on a bed and Ray Arcel was attending his swellings and lacerations. This was without question the high night of his career, but instead of smiles and festivity the place had a sick-room atmosphere. “He may be five years over the hill and at least fifteen pounds over his best fighting weight, but that Louis jab can still take your head off,” Ray Arcel, the trainer, an old friend of mine, said as he tended the wounds of the victorious fighter. Ez, the new undisputed champion of the world, nodded soberly, as Ray went on tenderly massaging with ice the angry swelling over the new champion’s left eye.

When I returned to the ballroom, to the drunks and the coarse laughter and the cigar smoke and the blondine consorts of the victory mob, I felt as if I had descended several layers into the Fighters’ Inferno. The room upstairs belonged to Homer and Vergil. But the Ezzard Charles Victory Ball was better adapted to the jaundiced style of Hogarth and Swift.

Now—years later—Marciano and Charles were approaching the weigh-in scales and the unruly crowd cautioned itself to quiet down. The weights were precious figures that would
make screaming late-afternoon headlines. “Marciano—187 ½, Charles—185½.” Boxing writers looked at each other in meaningful surprise. An excited murmur ran through this inside audience. Rocky had come in several pounds over his expected fighting weight. Charles, two years earlier when he had failed narrowly to regain his title from Jersey Joe, had scaled 191½. So now these statistics were charged with significance. What did this mean? Would Marciano be stronger or merely a little slower? Was Ezzard down too fine, possibly even through fear of the bruising Marciano, or was he trying to get back to the speed and sharpness (and actual weight) he had brought to the Louis win four years earlier? Sportswriters debated, ran for telephones, dictated learned analyses. On these few ciphers of avoirdupois, gamblers made their shrewd adjustments and the odds trembled.

After the weigh-in there was a long wet lunch at Shor’s, a kind of half-public, half-private party with everybody circulating and giving opinions, naturally including that old-style boniface Toots himself, that great tub of sentimentality, affability, generosity, and whiskey-sated, sports-crazed aficionado who has been to the boxing world of the last twenty or twenty-five years what the favorite Publick Houses were to the London prize ring of the early nineteenth century. Then back to Jimmy Tomatoes’s suite at the Hampshire House (Kazan, I think you’re still with us) to put in a ceremonial call to Rocky himself. Rocky (hiding out at a secret hotel near the site of the impending battle) was just fine. He felt just great. He was just lying down taking it easy. And what were we drunken so-and-so’s doing? He’d see us after the fight. The phone call completed, we repeated to each other Rooky’s exact words. His simplest statement seemed to us an indication of his attitude, his state of mind, that intangible on which all sportsmen lay great store. State of mind is important for a team player, adding to or subtracting from the general team morale. But the prizefighter—especially when the prize is the heavyweight championship of the world—can beat himself with his mind,
tightening up under pressure like Conn in the second Louis, or gathering himself through pain and punishment like Marciano when he refused to let Walcott knock him out the night Rocky took his title, using his own suffering as a source of inspiration for a final, terrible effort that, almost miraculously, put Walcott down and out of the boxing business.

Marciano combined a fanatical devotion to physical condition with the ideal state of mind for a big-fight competitor. There was a serenity about him that could never be mistaken either for overconfidence or complacency. “I’ve worked nine months to get my body in the best possible shape; if he knocks me down I’m determined to get up; sooner or later I insist on winning.” That’s what his casual “I feel good—look for you after the fight,” always communicated.

The spirit of festivity, of holiday expectancy of the close fans waiting for the fight almost always provides dramatic contrast with the spartan life of the fighter as he withdraws from worldly pleasures and prepares his mind and body with a monklike asceticism.

Most of the heavyweight champions—with the exception of the lethal playboy Maxie Baer—have followed rigid training procedures. Marciano, for example, would sweat out as much as nine months in a crude farmhouse above Grossinger’s, often expressing his loneliness for his wife and daughter, but resigned to the hard fact that with the money and the glory went the ordeal. Floyd Patterson, in the same tradition, had slept for months in a room that would hardly satisfy a hired farmhand, hanging his clothes on nails, locked in around the clock with his sparring partners and trainers. It has been an accepted theory through the years that the rough celibate life hardens and toughens a fighter and brings him to the sharp, mean edge necessary to his trial in the ring.

Only Ingemar Johansson has dared to challenge this rugged and lonely way. Spurning Rocky’s unadorned farmhouse, he chose a millionaire’s ranchhouse closer to the high life of Grossinger’s. Where Patterson’s personal life had been
reduced to a weekly long-distance call to his wife, Ingo had his fetching Swedish dumpling by his side almost constantly. His household had the atmosphere of a happy Swedish weekend party, with friend Birgit, mama and papa, brother Rolf and his pinup-type fiancée, and assorted friends from Garboland. Occasionally he showed up on the dance floor at Grossinger’s, and as late as midnight he was seen to wander Liberty’s lox-laden main street in search of delicatessen goodies with his Birgit. Meanwhile Champion Floyd had been safely tucked into his cell since ten o’clock. Ingo not only insisted on leading a normal social life but added another mysterious wrinkle when he refused to practice his one big punch, his right, which he regarded with as much awe as the Aztecs attending their God of War. Despite these aberrations he knocked out Floyd Patterson in Version No. 1, and old fighters were going around telling themselves that their world had fallen apart. “My God, all those years I put in living like a damned convict—my wife was ready to divorce me, my youngest kid didn’t even know me—and you mean all that time I was torturing myself for nothing!”

Or as a more sophisticated scribe said, “Ingo’s victory has done more for sex than anything since Mae West and Sigmund Freud.”

But celibacy and self-denial came back into their own in the second Patterson-Johansson when Floyd, who had trained in a drab, abandoned roadhouse in the Connecticut bush for almost a year, knocked out a self-confident Golden Goy from Göteborg in less than five rounds. Ingo lay unconscious for ten minutes while his womenfolk sobbed into their hands, and the many ladies among the paying customers—who responded to Ingo as perhaps to no other pugilist since Gorgeous Georges Carpentier—dripped lovely tears onto their minks.

I had dropped in on both training camps with Archie McBride, the heavyweight who had begun his career on my farm in Pennsylvania. The local New Hope postmaster and I had nurtured him until he was fighting Bob Satterfield, Nino Valdes, Hurricane Jackson, Alex Miteff, and a lot of others in
the top ten. Oddly enough, “our Archie,” as we called him to differentiate from “The Archie” Moore, was the only man in the world who had been in there with both Patterson and Johansson. So we felt we had an inside morning line. Floyd had knocked out
our
Archie after seven well-fought rounds in the Garden. Archie had gone the distance with Ingo in Göteborg and blew a hometown decision that had even the Göteborgers hooting their hometown boy. Floyd looked hard and crisp in his workouts and he enjoyed some vicious sessions with the big Cuban work horse Julio Mederos. Ingo, the erstwhile champion of the world, pawed through harmless rounds with his little brother, with a nimble Negro middleweight, and with a half-baked light-heavy he had imported from Sweden. The flacks were whipping up a “new look” for Johansson, who was said to be a greatly improved boxer and hitting well with his left as well as the right.

“That ain’t no new look,” said our Archie. “He just the same as when I box him in Göteborg. He hurt you with the right hand, but he got to throw it from away back. That’s all he has. He jab like a girl. And he don’t like it at all when you’re fightin’ inside. I fought a lot better fighters than him. I think I could beat ’im, here in the States. So Floyd, who’s got too many hands for me, has got to beat ’im four out of five.”

In his training camp interview Ingo was as personable as if he were doing another turn on the Dinah Shore show. Floyd was edgy and testy, as becomes the gladiator on the eve of his going forth to battle.

Press: “Had Ingo hurt you in the first fight?”

Floyd: “Well he knocked me out, didn’t he?”

Press: “Have you worked out any new strategy for this next fight?”

Floyd: “If I told you, how long would it be new?”

Press: “What punch was it that you just hurt Mederos with?”

Floyd: “You’re the boxing reporter. You were right there. Why don’t you tell me?”

Back at the press bar an out-of-town sportswriter was
complaining, over his free old-fashioned, about Floyd’s lack of the social graces. But I rather liked Floyd’s answers. They were smart and ready, if not quite as mellowed as Joe Louis’s characteristic retort when asked how he would cope with Billy Conn’s speed and boxing ability: “Well, he c’n run, but he can’t hide.”

Incidentally, I liked Joe’s answer when I asked him at lunch at the Patterson camp how he would have rated himself with Ingo. Never one for boasting, Louis had said quietly: “If I fight Johansson, I don’t think he even bother to get off the boat.”

Part III of the Patterson-Johansson trilogy, mimed in Miami Beach earlier this year, established veteran Archie McBride as a perceptive critic. “Ingo hurt you with the right hand”: the talented but tender-chinned Patterson was down twice in one round. “Ingo don’t like to get hurt”: pain is one of the occupational hazards of this crude profession and once again Johansson proved himself “mune” to punishment, philosophically accepting the “ten-and-out” count near the end of round six.

Are Floyd Patterson and Ingo Johansson in a class with Louis and Conn, Dempsey and Tunney, Jeffries and Corbett? Surely not Ingo, who happened to be the right color at the right time. Tough Sonny Liston and Olympic champion Cassius Clay [soon to become the world-famous Muhammad Ali] are the real thing. Meanwhile Patterson, a dragon-killer with a taste for tame or inexperienced dragons, dallies with young Tom McNeeley of Boston, green in more ways than one.